That Drug Kingpin Cancer Patient and Guilty Pleasure of a ‘Bad’ World

The first decade of the 21st century has been a boom time for murderers on television. James Gandolfini as the mobster Tony Soprano (“The Sopranos”), Michael Chiklis as the rogue cop Vic Mackey (“The Shield”), Bryan Cranston as the schoolteacher and meth kingpin Walter White (“Breaking Bad”): They’re among the most honored television performances of the era, representing 6 of the last 10 Emmy Awards for lead actor in a drama. (And another, Michael C. Hall as the forensics expert and serial killer Dexter Morgan, has been an Emmy nominee and recently won Golden Globes and Screen Actors Guild Awards.)

Those characters have all wrestled with guilt and rationalized their misdeeds (essential for maintaining credible antihero status). But none has been quite as guilt-wracked, or as creative in his rationalizations, as Mr. Cranston’s Walter, who returns in Season 3 of “Breaking Bad” on Sunday night on AMC.

Walter White is not a killer on the scale of Tony Soprano or Dexter Morgan, but in the very first episode of “Breaking Bad” in 2008 he dispatched two Albuquerque drug dealers, choking one of them to death with a bicycle lock. As Season 3 begins, the city is reeling from the midair collision of a private jet and a Boeing 737 that ended Season 2. Walter didn’t cause that, but as regular viewers of the show know, he and his meth-cooking protégé, Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul), aren’t entirely innocent either.

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Bryan Cranston in the third season of “Breaking Bad,” for which he has won two Emmys.Credit
Ben Luener/AMC

“I accept who I am,” Jesse says, still grieving the Season 2 death by overdose of his girlfriend, whose father happened to be an air traffic controller. “I’m the bad guy.” Walter, of course, never admits to being the bad guy, which is both the crux and, increasingly, the limitation of a series that is often called the best show on television.

The original premise — that a frustrated high school chemistry teacher would team up with a former student to manufacture New Mexico’s best methamphetamine — sounded like an ’80s light comedy, a film in which no would get hurt and the teacher, played by Michael J. Fox, would end up running a pharmaceutical company. In the late ’00s it became a darkly comic cable drama in which the teacher had to cover the medical bills for his Stage 3 lung cancer and also make enough to pay for his children’s education after his death.

Over the course of a seven-episode first season, it worked. Comedy and tragedy were in balance, and plausibility wasn’t unduly stretched. Then came the rave reviews, the first of Mr. Cranston’s two consecutive Emmys and an order for a 13-episode second season. That was a problem because the logic of the show demanded that the proud, self-righteous Walter, a master of denial, keep lying to nearly everyone about everything — not just his criminal activities but also, for as long as he could, his cancer diagnosis. As the lies compounded, Walter became less and less believable. (So did his wife, Skyler, played by Anna Gunn. How could she not see through him?) Mr. Cranston managed to keep Walter sympathetic through sheer force of personality.

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Anna Gunn as Skyler White, who now knows about her husband’s drug business.Credit
Ben Luener/AMC

The narrative bogged down too. Allowing Walter to win — over his drug rivals or his cancer — would kill the story, so the writers devised a cycle in which Walter and Jesse would make money but quickly find a way to lose it, or discover that they needed even more. For long stretches the action seemed to consist of Walter declaring that he was going to stop making meth and then changing his mind. Meanwhile Skyler sulked and nagged him about his frequent unexplained absences. (He missed the birth of his daughter while making his first big score.)

Skyler finally takes decisive action early in Season 3, a welcome development that doesn’t really change the status quo. Once she knows the truth, she’s as trapped as Walter is. She has to keep her mouth shut to protect their son, Walter Jr. (played with exceptional sweetness by the young actor R J Mitte, who has cerebral palsy). Mr. Paul’s Jesse spends the first episode moping at a retreat while trying to get over his grief and guilt, which puts one of the show’s funniest presences on the sidelines.

It’s nice to see the return to center stage of the Mexican drug cartel that figured prominently in Season 1 but was mostly offstage in Season 2. Daniel and Luis Moncada play twin enforcers who dress and act like the taciturn agents from “The Matrix.” Some “Breaking Bad” devotees may find the drug-war plot a little too arch, but it’s more entertaining than the family drama, which may be the heart of the show but has never been as interesting as the meth business.

Mr. Cranston has said in interviews that “Breaking Bad” cannot go on indefinitely; Walter’s situation will demand a resolution before long. It might have been best, from an artistic standpoint, if it had been done as a seven-episode closed-end mini-series. As long as it continues, we can admire Mr. Cranston’s skill at making the prickly, delusional, violence-prone Walter White approach likability.

Correction: April 28, 2010

A television column on March 19 about “Breaking Bad,” on AMC, misstated the length of the character Jesse’s stay at a rehabilitation center. He leaves at the end of the season’s first episode; he is not there for the first few episodes. The error was pointed out in an e-mail message from a reader the day the column appeared; this correction was delayed for research.

A version of this article appears in print on March 19, 2010, on Page C14 of the New York edition with the headline: That Drug Kingpin Cancer Patient And Guilty Pleasure of a ‘Bad’ World. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe